The TWC Facebook Summer Reading Club

The Writer's Center would like to do a FREE summer reading club, and we'd like you to participate. Here's how to get involved:

In the upper right of this page you will see a poll I've created (actually about at 1 o'clock). We came up with the list of four authors and their books. (Don't worry! The books are all fairly short). Take a look at the descriptions of each book below and decide which of the four you'd most like to read, then vote for it in the poll. The voting ENDS on June 30. You do NOT have to be based in the DC Metro region to participate. From wherever you are all over the world you can join the fun. All you need to do is read the book and respond to questions we'll post on Facebook beginning in July--and of course we'll encourage YOU to post questions as well. If we can generate enough steam with this maybe we can even get the author to participate. Once we know what the winning book is we'll create a reading/posting schedule. This should be easy and massively fun, right? Let's see how many people from all around the globe we can get reading the same book.


American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
From Booklist (via Amazon):
*Starred Review* The houses are ramshackle, the trucks hard-used, the weather extreme. The men, clad in shabby camouflage, are battered and scarred. They labor at dangerous, soul-killing jobs; hunt; drink too much; and stand by their loved ones no matter how flat-out crazy they are (or they think about killing them). Ditto for the women. Money is tight; the old ways and the precious wildlife are disappearing; loneliness is a plague; and the meth-cookers keep burning down the house. Welcome to rural Michigan, Campbell’s home ground, and a story collection of rare impact. These fine-tuned stories are shaped by stealthy wit, stunning turns of events, and breathtaking insights. Terrible injuries, accidental and otherwise, leave people and animals in misery, but they are salvaged, maybe even healed. Against all odds, salvation counterbalances loss and despair in unexpected ways in this small place of big feelings, where everyone is yoked together for better and worse, and where, as one persistent survivor observes, “what looked like junk to most people could be worth real money.” Campbell’s busted-broke, damaged, and discarded people are rich in longing, valor, forgiveness, and love, and readers themselves will feel salvaged and transformed by this gutsy book’s fierce compassion. --Donna Seaman

Us by Michael Kimball
(via Amazon)
A husband wakes up to find that his wife has had a seizure during the night. The husband calls an ambulance and his wife is rushed to a hospital where she lies in a coma. By day, the husband sits beside his wife and tries to think of ways to wake her up. At night, the husband sleeps in the chair next to his wife's bedside dreaming that she will wake up. He wants to be able to take her back home. years later, the story of this long and loving marriage is retold by their grandson. He wants to understand his grandmother's life and death, what it meant to his grandfather, and what it means to hi. he wants to understand - in his own words - "how love can accumulate between two people."

The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mingestu
From Publishers Weekly (via Amazon)
Starred Review. Barely suppressed despair and black wit infuse this beautifully observed debut from Ethiopian émigré Mengestu. Set over eight months in a gentrifying Washington, D.C., neighborhood in the 1970s, it captures an uptick in Ethiopian grocery store owner Sepha Stephanos's long-deferred hopes, as Judith, a white academic, fixes up the four-story house next to his apartment building, treats him to dinner and lets him steal a kiss. Just as unexpected is Sepha's friendship with Judith's biracial 11-year-old daughter, Naomi (one of the book's most vivid characters), over a copy of The Brothers Karamazov. Mengestu adds chiaroscuro with the story of Stephanos's 17-year exile from his family and country following his father's murder by revolutionary soldiers. After long days in the dusty, barely profitable shop, Sepha's two friends, Joseph from Congo and Kenneth from Kenya, joke with Sepha about African dictators and gently mock his romantic aspirations, while the neighborhood's loaded racial politics hang over Sepha and Judith's burgeoning relationship like a sword of Damocles. The novel's dirge-like tone may put off readers looking for the next Kite Runner, but Mengestu's assured prose and haunting set pieces (especially a series of letters from Stephanos's uncle to Jimmy Carter, pleading that he respect "the deep friendship between our two countries") are heart-rending and indelible. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans
From Publishers Weekly (via Amazon)
The territory Evans covers in her debut collection may be small, but she owns it. Her main characters are almost all teen girls and young women who struggle with disorder, and the reader is given close access to each one's interior, from which the muted plots originate. "Jellyfish," one of the better stories, starts out with the plight of middle-aged William, whose roof has just collapsed, before settling on his adult daughter, Eva, and examining her life. The two friends in "Virgins," the opening and best story, maneuver unsteadily through the minefield of casually predatory men and boys. "Snakes" looks back on a consequential summer in the lives of two little girls. "The King of a Vast Empire" is the biggest departure from form and is narrated by good son Terrence, who frustratedly tells the story of his free-spirited sister, Liddie. The stories are beautifully observed, though their similarities in theme and voice make them better read individually than together. Evans has some great chops that would really shine with a little more narrative breadth.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.